The Leaves are Starting to Change!

Road trip to the Columbus Temple

Our awesome district

Hello everyone!

It's been a great week. I'm so happy to be in Athens for at least another transfer!

We've done a ton of random stuff this week. So much service for so many random people, it's great! We really get to know and love people as we serve them. I don't really remember what else happened so I'll just start talking about people.

We've had to drop a lot of people... Here we go:

So we had to drop our investigator with a baptismal date. We were so sad, but we've prayed about it and it's the right thing. We feel confident that we've done everything we can to help him, it just isn't the right time I guess.

We also dropped the guy that thought the Sabbath should be on Saturday. He was very upset and arguing when we were trying to address his concerns. We didn't want to bash so we basically just said bye and left.

Okay I know we dropped more but I can't remember. Here are the people we're working with the most:

The guy that used to be in prison! He's still cool. We haven't had a lesson with him since last time, but we're working on rescheduling. He's probably the most promising right now.

Another investigator is an ex- Jehovah's Witness and basically hates them. She has awesome faith and really wants a church that will help, love, and accept her. She had worked with missionaries before but she said they were way too pushy. So we will need to be patient with her.

Then there's our maintenance man! He was asking a less active in our apartments a bunch of questions about us and the less active (one of our old man buddies we're working with) just gave him our number to ask us himself. We've been talking with him and he believes the church is true! There are issues with the landlord getting mad at him for talking to us, so it's kind of a slow process but he's awesome! We say curiosity BAPTIZED the cat.

Wow yep that's about it. We were kind of getting down about the promising people that didn't work out, then got super pumped to work even harder to find people who are ready. We had a meeting with our bishop and he said there are 80,000 people in Athens county. He says 1,000 of them are ready to receive the Gospel. He promised the way we will find them is through the members. ...so we're working with members a lot this transfer! But this time, we are supposed to meet with them ALL by next Thursday and set goals with them. We're not sure how this is all going to work out or how soon we'll find people through the members, but we are trusting in our leadership!

Lots of funny things have happened this week. Here we go:

One evening we were contacting a referral. We still don't know where the referral came from but we were excited to get one! The GPS took us wayyy out to this street that was in the boonies. The address took us to this plot of land that had a ton of scary campers. We didn't know which was his so we started knocking on all of them. Nobody answered, until we got to him! He was obviously drunk and was confused at how we found him. He says he's never even heard of missionaries or the Book of Mormon or anything we told him about. He told us to leave so we were about to go. We went to shake his hand and he kissed our hands. We were both like uhh AHH and kinda ran away after. We're glad we didn't die. We said if our moms knew where we were they would freak out.. Haha sorry mom! The funniest thing is earlier that morning in my studies I read in Mosiah 13:3... "Touch me not, for God shall smite you if ye lay your hands upon me, for I have not delivered the message which the Lord sent me to deliver; neither have I told you that which ye requested that I should tell; therefore, God will not suffer that I shall be destroyed at this time." Hahaha we died laughing after we remembered that. Studies are inspired!

Next funny thing. So our zone focus this month is extending baptism. Sister Blaser and I were trying to figure out the easiest way to extend baptism to as many people as possible. We decided it's easier to extend when you've talked about it a little bit. So we made the goal to mention baptism in every contact! It's often a stretch but it's cool. One day on campus we were doing this as we talked to everyone. One guy said he's going to school to become some sort of teacher. I said "Jesus was a teacher! He was perfect.. He was even baptized!" We got a weird look and the dude left. Haha. Another guy was kinda dancing down the street (he was high probably) and came up to us and said "are you guys friends with Jesus or something?" We kinda laughed and said basically.

That's about it! We've been kind of bound up in the Athens juggle struggle... We love the variety that's here, but it makes timing really hard. There are so many people that want us to serve them, but we can only do that during the day. ..which is the best time to be on campus. Then the best time to follow up with all the people we've met on campus is after dinner.. Which is the best time to be out and finding in The Plains. AND we need to see all the members. Which is usually during the evenings too. So yeah we love the variety but it makes it tough! Praying for ways to balance everything out and be where we need to be!

We get to go to the temple today! We are on our way right now. I'm stoked.

I hope everyone's having a good time at home! Good luck to everyone who have midterms and stuff... I'm not missing that one bit.

Love you all!
Sister Barnes